Day 650

We aren’t halfway through this presidency and the country has gone to shit.

It’s amazing how fast it can happen isn’t it?

Putin is claiming America is in decline and Trump is the big reason why.

We’ve been pulled out of economic, diplomatic, and arms treaties around the world. This and the fact that we haven’t filled many of the diplomatic posts around the world has led to our shrinking influence on the global stage. Plus, get this, the ambassador to South Africa is a lady who designs handbags and is a member of Trump’s Mar A-lago crowd. Great.

The stock market is in the dumper.

We have done nothing to protect our electoral process, and we are now hearing reports of voting machines switching votes thus undermining what electoral integrity we used to have. That is, what hasn’t been already undermined by the Republican gerrymandering, voter suppression and shutting down of polling places.

Now we have a shooting in a synagogue. What does our president suggest was the problem? That there wasn’t an armed guard there to return fire. This suggests that every place of worship should have armed guards ready to shoot? What could go wrong? I mean let’s give religious people the idea that they need to protect themselves from “the others.” Gee, has that led to problems in the past? Well, yeah, like most of history. I mean what is history but one long description of one group trying to impose their religious beliefs on another via force?

The only respite in Europe came at the end of The Hundred Years war when thirty different parties got together and negotiated for five years to end the thing. Why? Why did they get together to end it? And why weren’t the two most powerful forces on the European continent involved in that peace process? Interesting questions. The other players in Europe, the ones doing all the fighting were exhausted. The German principalities and the Polish plains areas were tired of one army or another sweeping over them and killing everyone who wasn’t on their side. The Pope and The Holy Roman Emperor were all for continuing. I mean why not? They weren’t doing the actual fighting. They were just whipping the masses into a frenzy to keep fighting. Protestant versus Catholic and all that. Finally, all the little people got together and hammered out a peace.

But we’re better than that right? Yeah, our president suggests it’s the victims’ fault. That they should have been armed. Don’t you want to go to church and see a couple of good Christian people standing at the doors with semi-automatic weapons ready to kill any infidel that might come near? How about them mosques? Or the ashrams? Or some temples? I mean freedom of religion means freedom for anyone to carry a firearm anywhere, am I right?

We gotta protect ourselves from those other people. Right? Right?

This isn’t “God Help Us.”

This is “We Gotta Help Ourselves.”

And the president in a quiet voice saying the usual hateful things he yells from his lectern at those rallies ain’t cutting it.

Moving on, to little tidbits I have learned:

The man who won the Nobel prize for figuring out how T-Cells work to stop cancer has played blues harp with Willie Nelson.

The reason Neville Chamberlain gave in to Hitler and let him take part of Czechoslovakia was that the day before 300 German speaking people were killed in Czechoslovakia and Hitler said he had to get in there to protect the remaining German speaking folks in that country. Chamberlain said okay. The 300 people killed was all bullshit. It was PR on German radio. Pure propaganda.

The Czech Republic has the town of Terezin. A medieval walled town the Nazis took over and kicked everyone out to use it as a poster child for what the relocation of Jews would look like. They had an orchestra and a choir and the Nazis took photos to use as propaganda to convince others to move peacefully. There were sinks in a long row to show that everyone could wash together. The sinks never worked. They were just to convince the Red Cross everything was hunky-dory. The gang showers worked. It was the same set up as the ones at the extermination camps, except the extermination camp shower rooms had no windows.

The guitarist on David Bowie’s CD “Let’s Dance” was none other than Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Who knew?

Early voting is seeing numbers twice what they were in the 2014 mid-term election. Democrats are urging people to vote early because of Republican efforts to throw people off voting rolls. The idea being that if you were removed from the voting roll you have time to fix it before the polls close on election day.

Voting is up in Delaware, Indiana, Minnesota, Tennessee, Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Nevada. This has Republicans worried. They may have to turn to actually changing the votes in the machines to steal some of these elections. Suppression and creating near impossible situations for people to vote may not be enough.

Did you hear about the mainly Spanish speaking county in Kansas? Yeah, I know, right? The supervisor of the election there moved the polling place out of town. Far away from public transportation. The usual rule of thumb for the number of people you need to have a voting place is 1200. This county has 13,000 people and they have one polling place! That wasn’t bad enough. They moved it out of town. The supervisor has been appealed to to open the old voting place in town. She didn’t respond to the request, but she did send the request along with her “LOL” comment to the Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Mr. “Operation Crosscheck”, and candidate for governor. Must be nice to know that they are doing everything they can to screw you over.

If we can’t cut you off the rolls, we can make it take hours and hours to vote in a remote location, and if that doesn’t work we’ll change your vote in the server. Trust me.

Wine and Rum

There was also a tidbit that a security guy bought two voting machines off eBay for $100 each. That was in 2014. He found that the data from the last election was still on them, which made it even easier that normal to figure out how to diddle the names and votes. Not that it was hard mind you. Nothing was encrypted and there were no real safeguards to getting into the machine. Alarmed he bought two more machines from the 2016 election. Surely things had been fixed. Nope. Situation normal.

Meanwhile, even with Congress not in session somehow judges are still being put in place. The Federalist Society is a conservative group and their list is where all the judges are being selected. These people are out of touch with regular Americans. This will screw up our lives for my foreseeable lifetime.

Candy!

President Obama has taken to the stump. He said that when a Republican says he’s for protecting
pre-existing conditions yet has voted against it consistently and might also be in favor of a current lawsuit that wants to strip away pre-existing conditions that person is lying. I wish this guy would have just stuck to being President.

Arianna Grande broke up with Pete Davidson for a pig. Yeah, you heard me. She likes her pet pig better than Pete. Somehow it seems right and it’s the kind of thing that would only happen to Pete.

Have a nice day! Please tip the armed personnel protecting you from “the others” on the way out.